BYOC – To Be Or Not To Be

BYOC – To Be Or Not To Be

I suppose that most CEOs and CIOs have been hoping that the consumerization of information technologies won’t go further than BYOD policy. Clients and employees have brought their devices in the offices, CIOs have introduced MDM-solutions (master data management) and have established the rules for using private and corporate smartphones and tablets. So it looks like the situation has been managed.

But the most important thing about consumerization is that it turned the IT industry by 180 degrees. Previously, all decisions were initiated by the board of directors, heads and chiefs. But now clients and employees choose the devices that like to work with, and very often these are personal devices rather than corporate ones.

So it’s no wonder that after BYOD there appeared a new trend called BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud). It means that employees prefer to use their personal cloud accounts for working purposes. What is more, these accounts are really hard to control. You can’t simply prohibit using this or that cloud service as there’re dozens of them.

Well, some people may say that it’s really a problem, let employees use whatever service they like and just accept it. But the problem is that some of the corporate documents may leak into the global network and it may happen accidentally, without any intentions. Surely, it may be a protected private account, but at the same time it may synchronize with another one, and the problems will still be there.

Another possible way out is to sign an agreement with some vendor or to buy a business version of a cloud service. But there other problems, like license agreement. What is more, there’re some problems with usability. For example, Evernote offers two types of account: private and corporate (Evernote Business), and the data for these two accounts are kept in different repositories but the interface is the same for both of them and the probability of a user mixing them up is quite high. Some cloud vendors, like Microsoft, have already started working in this direction.

But surely not all cloud vendors will create separate types of accounts for private and corporate clients. I think it’s time to concentrate on the protection of the data themselves rather than worrying about where these data are kept.

So it’s up to the company what position to take, but I think that’s it’s not the last thing we see from the consumerization and no one knows what will be brought to the office next.

By Eugene Rudenko

Eugene is a marketing manager for Oxagile, software development company offering custom SaaS solutions development for all types of businesses. Follow them in Twitter @Oxagile.

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